The special adviser appointed over a year ago to help the New Westminster school district get its financial house in order won’t release his report until October.
David Greenan was appointed to the district starting May 16, 2014, after superintendent John Gaiptman appealed to the education ministry for help dealing with a multimillion-dollar deficit he inherited when he took over as CEO in February 2014.
“The only way to get them to help me with no cost to the district was through a special adviser,” Gaiptman told the Record.
Gaiptman said he worked shoulder to shoulder with Greenan last summer, and the adviser made “oodles” of suggestions, all of which Gaiptman said the district has since followed with great success.
In April, the board passed a balanced budget that contained zero job cuts and included a $500,000 emergency surplus as well as a plan to pay off its $4.86-million accumulated debt by 2018.
Greenan’s original appointment lasted until April, but the ministry has reappointed him from July 28 to Oct. 2 to evaluate the district’s progress in implementing his recommendations and its progress with its deficit management plan.
Local parent and former district parent advisory council chair Paul Johansen, however, wants to know why the school district and the ministry haven’t made Greenan’s original recommendations public.
He tried to get access to Greenan’s original findings through a Freedom of Information request but was told that information would be rolled into the special adviser’s final report in October.
“There’s been a lot of controversy over the last decade,” Johansen told the Record. “I think they just need to be transparent and provide answers when parents are asking questions because they don’t have a good track record.”
The ministry, however, said Greenan has not yet written a formal report and all that would be available for release would be “working papers” that would lack context without information about how the district has acted on the adviser’s recommendations.
But all of Greenan’s suggestions will be included in his final report, according to Ian Aaron, director of the ministry’s school district financial reporting branch.
“If I thought that we were never going to complete anything, I think we’d have less of a leg to stand on,” he told the Record.
Aaron said he would be surprised if the board didn’t make the final report public since the district’s turnaround is a good-news story.
“They’ve taken it on and they’ve dealt with stuff,” he said, “and I’m sure they took a lot of pressure for doing some of these changes. Whenever you spend less or spend in different areas, there are some that are going to be put out by that.”
Gaiptman, meanwhile, assured the Record the report would be made public once the ministry released it to the district.
“In that report, it will outline what we have done to ensure that we don’t get into the same financial problems that we found ourselves in before. It will outline the David Greenan suggestions and it will outline what we have done as a district. It will be 1,000 per cent public, and we will post it to our website.”
